Tuesday, February 21, 2012

So long, and thanks for all the comments

My regular readers (if any of you are still out there) will have noticed that I haven't been posting much lately. In fact, the main reason that Rondam Ramblings seems to be alive at all is that Don Geddis has picked up a lot of the slack. Of the last ten or so postings here, Don wrote eight of them.

I have been writing Rondam Ramblings for nearly nine years now. When I started, there was no Facebook, no Twitter, no Googleplus. Blogger was its own company, and comments were a third-party add-on. I didn't really know what direction I was headed in terms of my writing when I started, and now nine years later I'm still not sure. But one thing I am sure of is that I don't have time to maintain a blog properly. There are too many other things going on my life right now. So it is with no small sense of regret that I have decided to shut Rondam Ramblings down.

I'm announcing this not because I want to make a big show out of taking my ball and bat and going home, but because I wanted to thank those of you who have read and commented on my posts over the years, and to let you know that the blog will be going away soon in case you have any favorite posts that you want to make copies of for your own use. I would ask you to please not republish any of the content here. If there is something you would like to see made available please contact me and I'll consider it. But one of the reasons I've decided to shut the blog down instead of just letting it linger is that I have come to realize that it is unwise to leave unedited thoughts publicly available on the internet.

If you want to keep in touch, drop me an email, or add me to your GooglePlus circles. I'll be hanging out over there for the time being. And if I decide to start writing regularly again I'll announce it on GooglePlus as well.

Very much appreciate the vote of confidence, Tony. Believe me, this was not an easy decision. But part of the reason I decided to take it down is that RR is *not* a book. A book is (usually) an edited, coherent whole, and RR is more like a diary.

I do plan to cherry-pick some of the better entries, clean them up, and re-post them as regular web pages (on a server that I control). But if there's something you particularly like you should make your own copy. If you really want the whole thing and don't want to write a crawler drop me a line and I'll send you the copy I've made.

BTW, one of the reasons I decided to shut down is that I no longer trust Google. It is impossible, as far as I can tell, to export a complete archive of a Blogger blog. There is an "export archive" link on the dashboard, but it doesn't actually work. The only way to get a complete archive is to crawl, and the longer I wait, the harder that gets. I don't want to wake up one day and find RR festooned with ads, or with the content hidden by obfuscating Javascript or something like that.

I've enjoyed your blog immensely, and have only stumbled upon it recently (past couple weeks). I hope you will be able to keep this blog running for as long as possible, because I feel like I have gained so much insight. Thanks for the most articulate and rational ideas.

While I don't follow your blog, I'm among those who are sad to see that you plan on ending your blogging. I'm here today because of a link you posted on news.ycombinator.com about Common Lisp Iterators. I would imagine that the post is among those you will want to save, for future reference. :-)

While I wouldn't consider it *completely* unreasonable to shut down your blog, one of your comments expressed the concern of your blog becoming overcome by spam comments. I would propose a simple solution, that would help prevent that from happening, at least until you could back everything up to your satisfaction: Turn comments off.

Hopefully you could do this for your entire blog, and not have to do it by hand for every post. I'm only just familiar enough with Blogger to know that you can do this, at least, for individual blog posts; if you can't do it globally, though, then it is a pointless suggestion.

Sadly, I don't think this will do much to prevent attacks on Javascript vunerabilities.